Greetings! I hope you’ve all been enjoying the latest issue of Defenestration. Now it’s time for another thrilling episode of Ben & Winslow! When we left Winslow, he had died after seeing Apsara in a little black dress. But he’s a cartoon character, so he’s back from the dead and ready to move on with his life. Or rather, he’s ready to move on with his love life, which is mercifully nonexistant.
Ten years, you guys. This October, Defenestration will be ten years old!
Have any of you ever read slush? Have you ever read slush for ten years straight? After so long a time, Eileen’s lucky to still have her sanity, and I’m lucky to still have my sanity and my rakish good looks. But the slush is wearing us down, and we’re quickly becoming editors on the edge. We don’t sleep well. We don’t eat well. Our nerves have been rubbed raw. I have literally—literally—seen Eileen turn into a Tyrannosaurus over seemingly insignificant things. The other day she almost leveled an IHOP after finding an uneven distribution of blueberries in her blueberry pancakes. This sort of destruction cannot continue no matter how awesome and no matter how many views the resulting videos on YouTube attain.
I love the stock expressions used in anime. If a guy sees a beautiful girl, he is almost guaranteed to get a nosebleed. Not just a nosebleed, but the sort of nosebleed that would drain him of all blood and kill him within moments. Apparently nosebleeds are associated with sexual arousal in Japan, so it’s really a visual cue for an erection.
Winslow has been known to control pests with unorthodox methods, but this is the first time the pests themselves have been unorthodox.
Today’s comic is based on an ongoing joke my wife and I have between us. Back when we were dating a million years ago, we saw several documentaries on the Apocalypse (as if a program about the Apocalypse could really be classified as a documentary). Several of the prophets of doom prepared maps of what the world would look like afterward, and one of the amusing constants was that Montana was always miraculously spared. The seas rose, the mountains crumbled, but Montana was always safe in the middle of it all, fiddling while the world burned.